KDE

Randa Meetings are a yearly collection of KDE Community contributor sprints that take place in Randa, Switzerland. With origins dating back to a Plasma meeting in 2009, Randa is one of the most important developer-related events in the community.

Two months ago I attended to KDE Edu Sprint 2017 at Berlin. It was my first KDE sprint (really, I send code to KDE software since 2010 and never went to a sprint!) so I was really excited for the event.

KDE Edu is the an umbrella for specific educational software of KDE. There are a lot of them and it is the main educational software suite in free software world. Despite it, KDE Edu has received little attention in organization side, for instance the previous KDE Edu sprint occurred several years ago, our website has some problems, and more.

Therefore, this sprint was an opportunity not only for developers work in software development, but for works in organization side as well.

In organization work side, we discuss about the rebranding of some software more related to university work than for “education” itself, like Cantor and Labplot. There was a wish to create something like a KDE Research/Science in order to put software like them and others like Kile and KBibTex in a same umbrella. There is a discussion about this theme.

The latest daily build live ISO images that landed earlier today for Kubuntu 18.04 LTS (Bionic Beaver) apparently uses the Breeze-Dark Plasma theme for the KDE Plasma 5.11 desktop environment by default. However, we've been told that it's currently an experiment to get the pulse of the community.

"Users running [Kubuntu] 18.04 development version who have not deliberately opted to use Breeze/Breeze-Light in their System Settings will also see the change after upgrading packages," said the devs. "Users can easily revert back to the Breeze/Breeze-Light Plasma themes by changing this in System Settings."

The amount of convenience is very high compared to other programs. The amount of “this one should be designed in a better way, it annoys me” things is the smallest of all the programs I use, and if something is broken, then most of these functions are announced to improve in 4.0.

For the past 3 years I’ve been working very hard because I fulfill a number of these roles for Builder. It’s exhausting and unsustainable. It contributes to burnout and hostile communication by putting too much responsibility on too few people’s shoulders.

It's been four months since the release of GIMP 2.9.6 and while GIMP 2.9 developments are sadly not too frequent, the next GIMP 2.9.8 release is preparing a host of changes.

Of excitement to those trying to use GIMP in a Wayland-based Linux desktop environment, GIMP's color picker has just picked up support for working on KDE/Wayland as well as some other Color Picker improvements to help GNOME/Wayland too. GIMP's Screenshot plugin also now has support for taking screenshots on KDE/Wayland either as a full-screen or individual windows. Granted, GIMP won't be all nice and dandy on Wayland itself until seeing the long-awaited GTK3 (or straight to GTK4) port.

The KDE Project released today a new version of its open-source KDE Frameworks software stack, a collection of over 70 add-on libraries to the Qt application framework, for GNU/Linux distributions.

Each month, KDE releases a new KDE Frameworks build, and version 5.41.0 is now available for December 2017, bringing a month's worth of improvements, bug and security fixes, as well as updated translations.

KDE Frameworks 5.41 is now available as the latest monthly update to this collection of add-on libraries complementing Qt5.

KDE Frameworks 5.41 has a number of fixes including some crash fixes, updated translations, improvements to Kirigami, support for the idle inhibit manager protocol in KWayland, many Plasma Framework changes, and other updates.

KDE Frameworks are 70 addon libraries to Qt which provide a wide variety of commonly needed functionality in mature, peer reviewed and well tested libraries with friendly licensing terms. For an introduction see the Frameworks 5.0 release announcement.

For our Russian readers who are fans of the KDE desktop, ROSA Desktop Fresh R10 was released this week as one of the notable Russian Linux distributions that is aligned with a KDE desktop. ROSA Desktop Fresh continues offering both KDE 4 and KDE Plasma 5 desktop options.

While the distribution is called ROSA Desktop Fresh, not everything is fresh about its packages besides still having around KDE4. ROSA Desktop Fresh R10 is still sadly using the Mesa 17.1 release series. On the kernel front they are shipping Linux 4.9.60 which is an LTS release albeit still rather dated for desktop hardware support.

A long-standing KDE initiative that hasn't received as much attention as it deserves is KDE Connect for allowing KDE to interface with other devices -- namely smartphones -- for being able to display phone notifications on your desktop and more. A new KDE Plasmoid makes it easy now to send/receive SMS text messages.

Once you have it configured to use the correct device, you type in the phone number of the person you wish to send the message to in the first box (as below). Please note this needs to be the international dialling code (ie +44 for the UK, +353 for Ireland). Then type your message and click the Send button, it’s that simple!

Elisa allows to browse music by album, artist or all tracks. The music is indexed using either a private indexer or an indexer using Baloo. The private one can be configured to scan music on chosen paths. The Baloo one is much faster because Baloo is providing all needed data from its own database. You can build and play your own playlist.

Available for GNU/Linux, macOS, and Microsoft Windows platforms, the Qt Creator 4.5 release comes three months after the previous version to add a new UI tool that lets you manage Android SDK packages, as well as to offer better information about various issues with the installed Android SDK, including warnings about missing components or the minimum version of requirements.

"Since Android SDK tools version 25.3.0, there is no UI tool available to manage the Android SDK packages. Because of that, we have added such UI to Qt Creator," Eike Ziller wrote in the release announcement. "Unfortunately, the command line tool for managing SDKs that is provided with the SDK cannot update packages on Windows, and fails with JDK 9, so this applies to Qt Creator as well."

Coming six months after the long-term supported Qt 5.9 series, Qt 5.10 is a short-lived branch that introduces new stuff and a bunch of improvements. The biggest new feature of the Qt 5.10 release being the introduction of Qt 3D Studio, a graphical editor that lets you create 3D graphical user interfaces (GUIs).

"Qt 3D Studio consists of both a runtime component that is run in your application and a graphical design tool to design and create the UI. While the tool is a standalone application, the runtime can easily be integrated with the rest of Qt," said Lars Knoll. "Qt 3D Studio will work with both Qt 5.9 and 5.10."

Qt 5.10 is now officially out as the half-year update to the Qt5 tool-kit.

Qt 5.10 is arriving just a few days late and is a big feature update. Qt 5.10 features many improvements to Qt Quick and QML, initial Vulkan support, support for streaming Qt UIs to WebGL-enabled browsers, OpenGL ES improvements, new functionality in Qt 3D, a new QRandomGenerator as a "high quality" RNG, OpenSSL 1.1 support in Qt Network, embedded improvements, updated Qt WebEngine, and Qt Network Authentication for OAuth/OAuth2 support and Qt Speech for text-to-speech capabilities. There's a whole lot more as well.

Originally based on Arch Linux, Chakra GNU/Linux is a rolling Linux-based operating system built on top of the latest KDE software. Once Chakra GNU/Linux is installed on your personal computer, you will receive updates forever, without the need to download a new ISO snapshot and reinstall the entire OS.

As of December 1, 2017, Chakra GNU/Linux users can update their installations to the latest KDE Plasma 5.11.4 desktop environment, as well as both KDE Applications 17.08.3 and KDE Frameworks 5.40.0 software suites. Under the hood, the distro is now powered by Linux kernel 4.13.11 or Linux kernel 4.4.93 LTS, and systemd 235.

Incorporating pretty much the same improvements that the Linux Mint devs implemented in the final releases of the Cinnamon and MATE editions of Linux Mint 18.3 "Sylvia" earlier this week, today's KDE and Xfce flavors are based on Ubuntu 16.04.3 LTS (Xenial Xerus) and powered by the Linux 4.10 kernel.

"Linux Mint 18.3 is a long-term support release which will be supported until 2021. It comes with updated software and brings refinements and many new features to make your desktop experience more comfortable to use," read the release announcements for Linux Mint 18.3 KDE and Xfce Editions.

More in Tux Machines

Debian-Based Q4OS Linux Distro to Get a New Look with Debonaire Desktop Theme

Q4OS is a small GNU/Linux distribution based on the latest Debian GNU/Linux operating system and built around the Trinity Desktop Environment (TDE). It's explicitly designed to make the Microsoft Windows to Linux transition accessible and more straightforward as possible for anyone.
Dubbed Debonaire, the new desktop theme uses dark-ish elements for the window titlebar and panel. Somehow it resembles the look and feels of the acclaimed Arc GTK+ theme, and it makes the Q4OS operating system more modern than the standard look offered by the Trinity Desktop Environment.

today's leftovers

Emmabuntüs recently released a video where they explain the goals and reasons of the project, current achievements and show people who really use this operating system. You can also see the members of the project live.

The U.S. Commerce Department's National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) has issued the second draft of the proposed update to the Framework for Improving Critical Infrastructure Cybersecurity—also known as the Cybersecurity Framework. The American National Standards Institute (ANSI) encourages all relevant stakeholders to submit draft comments to NIST by the deadline on Friday, January 19, 2018.

VLC 3.0 is something we've been looking forward to for years and it's looking like that big multimedia player update could be released very soon.
Thanks to Phoronix reader Fran for pointing out that VLC 3.0 release candidates have begun to not much attention. VLC 3.0 RC1 was tagged at the end of November and then on Tuesday marked VLC 3.0 RC2 being tagged, but without any official release announcements.

A new major release is available of Cryptsetup, the user-space utility for dealing with the DMCrypt kernel module for setting up encrypted disk volumes.
Cryptsetup 2.0.0 is notable in that it introduces support for the new on-disk LUKS2 format but still retaining support for LUKS(1). The LUKS2 format is security hardened to a greater extent, more extensible than LUKS, supports in-place upgrading from LUKS, and other changes.

There is no doubt Facebook is one of the most popular and dynamic social network platform in the modern Internet era. It has revolutionized technology, social networking, and the future of how we live and interact. With Facebook, We can connect, communicate with one another, instantly share our memories, photos, files and even money to anyone, anywhere in the world. Even though Facebook has its own official messenger, some tech enthusiasts and developers are developing alternative and feature-rich apps to communicate with your buddies. The one we are going to discuss today is Caprine. It is a free, elegant, open source, and unofficial Facebook messenger desktop app built with Electron framework.

It turns out that if firing up KDE's KWin Wayland compositor without XWayland support, it can start up so fast that it causes problems.
Without XWayland for providing legacy X11 support to KDE Wayland clients, the KWin compositor fires up so fast that it can cause a crash in their Wayland integration as KWin's internal connection isn't even established... Yep, Wayland compositors are much leaner and cleaner than the aging X Server code-base that dates back 30+ years, granted most of the XWayland code is much newer than that.

NetworkManager now has support for Intel's lean "IWD" WiFi daemon.
IWD is a lightweight daemon for managing WiFi devices via a D-Bus interface and has been in development since 2013 (but was only made public in 2016) and just depends upon GCC / Glibc / ELL (Embedded Linux Library).

Linux Foundation: Servers, Kubernetes and OpenContrail

The Cloud Native Computing Foundation, home of the Kubernetes open-source community, grew wildly this year. It welcomed membership from industry giants like Amazon Web Services Inc. and broke attendance records at last week’s KubeCon + CloudNativeCon conference in Austin, Texas. This is all happy news for Kubernetes — the favored platform for orchestrating containers (a virtualized method for running distributed applications). The technology needs all the untangling, simplifying fingers it can get.
This is also why most in the community are happy to tamp down their competitive instincts to chip away at common difficulties. “You kind of have to,” said Michelle Noorali (pictured), senior software engineer at Microsoft and co-chair of KubeCon + CloudNativeCon North America & Europe 2017. “These problems are really hard.”

Network slicing is poised to play a pivotal role in the enablement of 5G. The technology allows operators to run multiple virtual networks on top of a single, physical infrastructure. With 5G commercialization set for 2020, many are wondering to what extend network functions virtualization (NFV) and software-defined networking (SDN) can help move network slicing forward.

Juniper Networks has announced its intent to move the codebase for OpenContrail, an open-source network virtualisation platform for the cloud, to the Linux Foundation. OpenContrail provides both software-defined networking (SDN) and security features and has been deployed by various organisations, including cloud providers, telecom operators and enterprises to simplify operational complexities and automate workload management across diverse cloud environments.

Juniper Networks plans to move the codebase for its OpenContrail open-source network virtualization platform for the cloud to the Linux Foundation, broadening its efforts to drive more software innovations into the broader IT and service provider community.
The vendor is hardly a novice in developing open source platforms. In 2013, Juniper released its Contrail products as open sourced and built a user and developer community around the project. To drive its next growth phase, Juniper expanded the project’s governance, creating an even more open, community-led effort.

The annual Open Source Jobs Report from Dice and The Linux Foundation reveals a lot about prospects for open source professionals and hiring activity in the year ahead. In this year’s report, 86 percent of tech professionals said that knowing open source has advanced their careers. Yet what happens with all that experience when it comes time for advancing within their own organization or applying for a new roles elsewhere?